Posted on 01/15/2022 10:59:30 AM PST by elpadre
Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to only 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1.
Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die, the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.
Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in the immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.
Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.
In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer Eric Kaufmann, have made parallel arguments.
What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry, children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value.
Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.
(Excerpt) Read more at asiatimes.com ...
This is a good article to read in full and debate/discuss!!!
and more of article:
“..What should the United States do about this? Declining fertility is a cultural and confessional phenomenon and not directly susceptible to government initiatives. There are only three options open to public policy:
+Encourage a higher fertility rate through economic incentives;
+Attempt to reverse the long-term decline in productivity growth to allow a smaller base of taxpayers to support a larger proportion of retirees;
+Encourage the immigration of working-age adults who contribute more to the social insurance system than they take from it.
The first option is desirable but likely to have a small effect. The second and third options are inseparable. Reversing the long-term decline of labor productivity requires the reconstruction of America’s depleted manufacturing sector, and that in return requires a much larger number of engineers than American universities presently produce. ...”
China and India can keep their cheap labor.
Okay, but they’ll have to speak Spanish like everyone else.
yeah well, unless they’re going to come up across the border from mexco, good luck wi that...
Usually they say there’s a population explosion, disaster, death, famine.
That’s all I’ve heard my whole life - Doom.
Well, it never happened.
This is the opposite. Not enough people means doom.
All Asian countries are imploding with fertility.
Where are these asian immigrants coming from?
“...keep their cheap labor...”
the article refers to the skilled workers - scientists, engineers, etc. - the big bucks boys!
I know this is controversial for the average Leftist or Chamber of Commerce Third World Immigration fanatic but...
Why not just make it a hell of a lot easier for the citizens to have large families like we did just a few decades ago?
And not listen to propagandists like Paul Ehrlich about how we’re all supposed to abort ourselves out of existence?
Let the Leftists do that. They already did, in fact, and that’s why they have to import a voting bloc for themselves, and try to manipulate our kids in their Indoctrination Centers (”Public Schools”).
Working fairly well in Hungary, Poland and even Russia.
I’ll bet the Beaner Times says the same thing but with a different ethnic group promoted.
“This is a good article to read in full and debate/discuss!!!”
Obviously not since you are not discussing ...
No Chinese however...except those from Taiwan.The others are security risks.
“..Where are these asian immigrants coming from?..”
Most illegal immigrants are Hispanic and African
Talk to our FRiends who work in IT...
The United States are in no need of so called “skilled workers”.
Having been in Engineering for 4 decades, I can tell you that there are more then enough native born to do those jobs...just not at the rates that the average globalist sweat shop wants to pay.
And towns like Sunnyvale, California are now minority American after having MASSIVE immigration for the last 30 years since the H1B program was passed to “relieve the shortage of computer workers”...when there never was one.
You’re starting from a falsehood.
There are some things more important than oligarchs getting slightly more money by importing foreigners into America. Maybe people don’t want to have kids because they want them to have to grow up in Mexico 2.0.
“..Obviously not since you are not discussing ...”
hopefully there a few here on FR that will discuss it as it is a topic of concern - long range, maybe, but a concern nonetheless.
They are the educated segments of their populations who face little opportunity at home, or at least a crappy standard of living compared to living in a Western country.
They are our white-collar scabs/replacements.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.